Matt Foster: Foster Knives

Designing and Marketing a Foster Knife

The focus of Matt's talk will be the overview of his design process when creating knives. Foster Knives are designed initially with a purpose driven or market driven perespective. Each influences the design in its own way, affecting the blade shape, the materials, whether it is locked or fixed, and other factors. Then we'll examine how marketing and manufacturing influences are integrated into the design process. Finally Matt will go over some specific processes as examples of how those influences play out, and the importance of not allowing the manufacturing to be the only things that mitigates the design.

Matt Foster's entire career has been in the sporting goods and shooting sports industry. His professional experience with knives and design began at Gerber Legendary Blades. This led to designing (self taught) and making my own knives when I saw there was a market niche not being served by existing makers and designers. The experience I gained from designing my own knives was a segway into other designing and creating other products for my career including scope mounts, shotgun stocks, gun cleaning equipment and othe firearms accessories.